Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Emerson was reserved and austere, not unlike the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who had a similar reverence for nature. Emerson transferred his family’s religious vocation to the Romantic cult of nature, a pagan pantheism. His holistic vision of nature, like that of his friend Henry David Thoreau, prefigures 1960s ecology: indeed, Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a journal of his experiment in monastic living in the woods near Boston, became a canonical text for the Sixties counterculture.

  The most intriguing of the parallels between New England Transcendentalism and 1960s thought is Emerson’s interest in Asian literature—mainly Hindu sacred texts (the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads) and Confucius’ maxims. India’s religious literature had been unknown to the West until the first European translation of the Bhagavad Gita appeared in 1785, when Sanskrit studies had just begun.

  The titles Emerson gave to his poems “Brahma” and “Maya” were inexplicable to most readers at the time. (Brahma is the Hindu creator god; Maya is the veil of illusion.) “Brahma,” first published in 1857, was the butt of so many satirical lampoons that Emerson’s publisher begged him, to no avail, to drop it from the 1876 edition of his selected poems. In his seminal essays (1836–41), Emerson refers to God as the “Over-Soul,” a translation of the Sanskrit word atman, meaning “supreme and universal soul.” Emerson’s “Over-Soul” would be reinterpreted by Friedrich Nietzsche as the Übermensch, which translators often misleadingly render in English as “Superman.”

  Emerson’s study of Hindu literature, which intensified after his first wife’s death, was documented by Arthur Christy, a professor at Columbia University, in his 1932 book, The Orient in American Transcendentalism. Christy inspected borrowing records at the Boston Athenaeum and Harvard College Library, as well as Emerson’s journals and marginalia, to trace his considerable reading history of Asian texts. By contrast, Harvard Library records showed no sign that the undergraduate Thoreau ever withdrew books on Eastern religion. His transforming knowledge of it came entirely from his casual reading in Emerson’s personal library, through which he was guided by Emerson’s second wife. Among the other Transcendentalists, Bronson Alcott was most interested in Hindu philosophy, which he had explored while working as a Philadelphia schoolteacher in the 1830s.

  Emerson the sage was the main draw in the Transcendentalist circle. Harvard students and other young people flocked to hear him speak or made pilgrimages to his home in Concord. His warm rapport with and encouragement of the young came from his own conflicts with authority, from which evolved his doctrine of American individualism and self-reliance. Emerson’s charismatic appeal as an anti-establishment mentor could be compared to that of the early Timothy Leary, who warned, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” (As a college student in 1966, I witnessed the mob scene around Leary when I traveled with other students from Binghamton to Cornell University to hear him speak about LSD and his new League for Spiritual Discovery.)

  In Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman absorbed British Romantic poetry as well as Emerson’s poems and essays, with their disparate Asian influences. Whitman’s sprawling, pagan epic (expanded over succeeding decades) openly challenged Judeo-Christianity. After William Blake’s allegorical long poems, Leaves of Grass is Western literature’s closest approximation to the dynamic form and visionary style of Hindu sacred literature, with its cosmic scale. Whitman’s poem would have tremendous influence on the 1960s via Fifties Beat poetry, in particular Allen Ginsberg’s prophetic protest poem, Howl (1956), which imitates Whitman’s long, incantatory lines. Ginsberg regularly paid homage to Whitman, as in his amusing 1955 poem, “A Supermarket in California,” which addresses Whitman by name.

  The limitations in Emersonian Transcendentalism are suggested by the reservations expressed by both Emerson and Thoreau to the sexual material in Leaves of Grass, which, despite their great admiration for the poem, they felt to be crude flaws. Emerson, who had always disliked the bawdiness in Shakespeare’s plays, actually advised Whitman to purge sexual references from later editions of Leaves of Grass. In this respect, the Romantic nature cult of Emerson and Thoreau betrays their Puritan lineage. They see nature in clean, rigorous terms but cannot tolerate or encompass nature’s stormier energies—the theme of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Significantly, though he enjoyed choosing hymns for Sunday services, Emerson did not much care for music. Despite the call for ecstasy in his poem “Bacchus,” he was evidently made uncomfortable by music’s heady rhythms and emotional stimulation. It was the American 1960s that would complete Transcendentalism—through the new, barbaric medium of rock.

  5. AMERICAN STRAINS OF ASIAN RELIGION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  The pervasive presence of Asian religion in the bohemian underground in the U.S. after World War Two was unparalleled in avant-garde and existentialist Paris during the same period. Anti-clericalism—hostility to priests and church hierarchy—has been entrenched among the European intelligentsia since the Enlightenment, partly because the Roman Catholic Church was once an active force in politics and economics and, in the period of the Papal States, was a nation in its own right.

  The defiant rejection of organized religion by Beat poets and artists was a substantial part of their legacy to the 1960s counterculture. Their hip appropriation of Asian thought is illustrated by the title of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 autobiographical novel, The Dharma Bums (dharma is a Hindu and Buddhist term for natural truth or right living). Though most of the Beats merely dabbled in Asian religion, they borrowed enough to help their second-generation fans critique Western intellectual assumptions. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the other Beats who drifted to San Francisco in the 1950s learned about Zen Buddhism from the poet Gary Snyder, a rugged, Thoreau-style naturalist from Oregon who would later live in a monastery in Japan. (A leading character in The Dharma Bums is based on Snyder.) Buddhist references percolated from the Beats into anti-academic poetry of other schools from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

  A Zen Institute was established in New York in 1930; San Francisco’s Zen Center began in 1959. But American interest in Zen was primarily stimulated by two nonfiction writers, Daisetz T. Suzuki (1870–1966), a Japanese Buddhist scholar, and Alan Watts (1915–73), who was born in England. In the 1950s, Suzuki lectured extensively on Mahayana Buddhism in the U.S., including as a visiting professor at Columbia University. Watts was an Anglican priest with a master’s degree in theology who had had an interest in Asian thought and culture since adolescence. His first book on Buddhism, The Spirit of Zen, was published in 1936 after he had met Suzuki in London earlier that year. Watts was the Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University near Chicago during World War Two and then moved to the West Coast, where he taught at the School of Asian Studies in San Francisco and joined the Los Angeles Vedanta Society, devoted to Vedanta Hinduism. Watts’ many books, such as The Way of Zen (1957) and Psychotherapy East and West (1961), were widely available as vividly bound paperbacks in the Sixties. Though Watts has sometimes been dismissed as a popularizer, I can attest that his comparative studies of Asian and Western culture had a great impact on me as a student. In 1966, he spent several days at my college, where he lectured on “Narcotics and Hallucinogenic Drugs” and “Differing Views of the Self and Its Relation to Nature.”

  It was Watts’ reference to “cosmic consciousness” in his 1962 book, The Joyous Cosmology, that put it into the cultural atmosphere of the time. The term had been coined by a Canadian psychiatrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, in a very odd, spiritualistic book, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901). While superintendent of an asylum for the clinically insane, Bucke had begun to question the standard categories of Western logic and science. In 1894, he read a paper called “Cosmic Consciousness” to a meeting of the American Medico-Psychological Association in Philadelphia. In his book, Bucke attempted to fuse Asian and Western religion by juxtaposing somewhat quirky profiles of figures like Buddha, J
esus, Dante, William Blake, and Walt Whitman. Such extraordinary individuals, Bucke felt, exuded a palpable magnetic aura because they had attained spiritual illumination.

  The Hinduism of the American 1960s had several sources. Allen Ginsberg modeled his prophetic persona on Blake as well as on visionary rabbis in his own Jewish tradition. Though introduced to Buddhism by Gary Snyder, the gay, bookish Ginsberg had none of Snyder’s athletic asceticism. Chatty and omnivorous, Ginsberg celebrated appetite and excess in food and sex. By the Sixties, he had transformed himself into a genial Hindu guru. Playfully brandishing finger-cymbals and a squeezebox and sometimes dressed in Hindu robes, the bearded Ginsberg was a constant, mantra-chanting presence at major demonstrations. He turned political theater into vaudeville—much like the Yippies, who nominated a pig for president in 1968.

  Hinduism had had an organized basis in the U.S. since the 1890s, following the visit of Swami Vivekenanda, a disciple of the legendary Indian spiritual leader, Ramakrishna, to the Parliament of Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Vivekenanda (1863–1902) founded the American Vedanta Society in New York City, from which numerous branches opened around the country. Until after World War Two, however, American interest in Hinduism was mainly confined to urban centers and was connected in the popular mind with kooks, charlatans, and Hollywood actors. Aldous Huxley, who had moved to California, studied Vedanta Hinduism with Swami Prabhavananda in the 1940s and was a member of the Los Angeles Vedanta Society. Another British expatriate, Christopher Isherwood, edited a book about the Society, Vedanta for Modern Man (1951). The openly gay Isherwood, whose autobiographical Berlin Stories about decadent 1930s Germany inspired I Am a Camera and Cabaret, had converted to Hinduism after moving to Los Angeles.

  The groundwork for the Asian trend of the American Sixties was probably laid by Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952), the first yoga master to teach full-time in the West. Born in Bengal, Yogananda established the international headquarters of his Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles in 1925. He lectured to packed audiences, including at Carnegie Hall, and met President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. His Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) had an enormous impact, not least for the numinous, Christlike cover photo of the white-robed, boyishly beardless guru with long hair flowing over his shoulders. The director of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where Yogananda was buried, stated in an affidavit that there was “no physical disintegration” in his body twenty days after death, “a phenomenal state of immutability.”

  A singular figure of lesser influence was “Avatar” Meher Baba (1894–1969), who arrived in the U.S. in 1952 and opened a center in South Carolina. Baba was an author and teacher born to a Zoroastrian family in India. Mute from the 1920s on, perhaps as the result of being struck on the head years earlier, he communicated by smiles, gestures, and an alphabet board. He worked with the poor and insane in India in the 1940s. Baba’s sometimes nebulous philosophy of “spiritual value” and world harmony, resembling that of Yogananda, prefigured New Age. In the Sixties, he strongly condemned the use of LSD and other drugs as a route to enlightenment.

  The major Asian cult of the Sixties was Transcendental Meditation, founded in India as the Spiritual Regeneration Movement by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1957. The Maharishi brought TM to Hawaii in 1959, from which it spread to North America and Europe. His practice of deep relaxation, whose aim is “bliss,” was based on ancient Vedic literature that he claimed to have learned from his master, Shri Guru Deva. At the start, TM had more cult-like characteristics, such as a personal secret mantra imparted by master to student. The Maharishi was at times accused of claiming godlike powers. By the mid-1970s, TM was more professionally organized as a business, with certified trainers teaching the system at stress-relief centers throughout the U.S. In 1974, TM bought the campus of a Presbyterian college in Iowa and opened the Maharishi University of Management. TM currently claims five million followers worldwide. Deepak Chopra, the New Age motivational speaker and bestselling author who became a media star through his visibility on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, was a disciple of the Maharishi but broke with him and TM in 1993.

  Several cults caused much public concern in the Sixties and Seventies because of their hold on young people. The Hare Krishna movement—the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, which claims to have been founded in the sixteenth century—is still in operation, with headquarters in Mayapur, India. Its followers became notorious for their shaved heads, saffron robes and beads, and aggressive behavior on street corners as they sang, shook rattles and tambourines, and pushed pamphlets. Their ascetic founder, Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), had begun preaching in India in the 1950s and moved to New York in 1965. There he wrote books and conducted mass chanting of Hindu phrases in Tompkins Square Park—provocative activity at the time. In 1966, he began publishing Back to Godhead magazine and incorporated his organization, which required disciples to renounce meat, alcohol, gambling, and extramarital sex. He then took the Society to San Francisco, where it drew an enormous hippie following, particularly among those addicted to drugs. His disciples carried the message to London and Berlin; at the Society’s peak, there were 108 centers worldwide. The movement won much publicity at the 1970 release of George Harrison’s song, “My Sweet Lord,” with its “Hare Krishna” refrain. The Hare Krishnas were pursued with huge fanfare by Ted Patrick, a “deprogrammer” who forcibly rescued young people from cults and returned them to worried parents. A former staff member for then Governor Ronald Reagan in California, Patrick inaccurately warned that the Krishnas were a cult as dangerous as Charles Manson’s.

  The Divine Light Mission was brought to the U.S. in 1971 by thirteen-year-old Maharaj Ji, whose father had founded the organization in India in the 1920s. Its Sikh and Hindu philosophy required vegetarianism, celibacy, and meditation. American hippies searching for gurus in India in the Sixties had appealed to Maharaj Ji, who claimed to be the successor of Jesus and Buddha, to visit America. The Divine Mission’s Denver commune would become its world headquarters: it claimed 480 centers in thirty-eight countries. By 1973, there were thirty-eight ashrams in the U.S. with 40,000 followers. The organization began to unravel later in the 1970s when Maharaj Ji’s taste for luxury cars and mansions was exposed. When he married, he incurred the wrath of the Divine Mission’s power behind the throne—his mother, who returned to India and tried to supplant him with his brother.

  As the Hindu boom subsided in the 1970s, neo-Christian sects like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple rose to prominence. The Children of God, founded in 1968 as Teens for Christ by “Moses” David Berg in Huntington Beach, California, were negligible in number but came to public attention when they loudly prophesied that the U.S. would be destroyed by Comet Kohoutek in January 1974. The group continues under the name “The Family” and is regularly excoriated by conservative Christian watchdog groups for its practice of free love (called “Flirty Fishing”) as well as its heretical beliefs that Jesus was sexually active and that God is a woman.

  The most important neo-Christian sect of the Seventies was the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, founded by the Reverend Sun Myong Moon in Seoul in 1954. Missionaries of the Unification Church were at work in the U.S. from 1959 on, but there was little publicity until Moon arrived in 1971. Moon was born in 1920 into a farming family in what is now North Korea. He was raised by Confucian principles until his parents became Presbyterians in 1930. In 1935, Moon claimed, Jesus appeared in a vision to summon him to ministry. Because of his staunch anti-communism (he had been imprisoned by Korean Communists), he was welcomed by Republican legislators in the U.S. and was hosted by President Richard Nixon in the White House. In 1981, however, Moon was charged with tax evasion and would eventually spend thirteen months in prison.

  Though massive advertisements for the Unification Church still appear in major world newspapers, the zenith of Moon’s orga
nization was 1982, when he sponsored a mass wedding of 2,075 couples in Madison Square Garden. The grooms wore badges declaring “World Peace Through Ideal Family,” upholding conservative family values against the sexual anarchy of the psychedelic Sixties and disco Seventies. However, most Americans, as evidenced by the slang term “Moonies” for its members, continue to regard the Unification Church as just another Asian cult. Moon’s Christian theology is unorthodox: he preaches, for example, that Jesus was illegitimate, the product of an affair between Mary and her cousin’s husband, Zachariah.

  6. HINDUISM AND 1960S MUSIC

  A main aperture through which Hinduism flowed into the Sixties was popular music, which adapted the non-Western harmonics of raga and experimented with the sitar, the long-necked Indian lute. George Harrison, the Beatles’ lead guitarist, was not the first British musician to experiment with the sitar, but he deserves principal credit for popularizing it in Anglo-American rock music. Jangling sitar riffs were a ubiquitous lyrical motif in late-Sixties music. At the opening of songs, the sitar was equivalent in meaning and effect to the European church bell, summoning the faithful to worship.

  The first Western album of Indian music, a collaboration between Yehudi Menuhin and sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, was released in 1955. In the late Fifties, Khan’s brother-in-law, Ravi Shankar, gave sitar concerts in Europe and the U.S. By 1959, Shankar had influenced jazz compositions by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. By the mid-Sixties, the sitar sound had traveled far afield into folk music circles in Great Britain, New York, and San Francisco.

  Harrison’s interest in India began during production of the Beatles’ second movie, Help! (1965), with its slapstick Hindu subplot. He was intrigued by the sitar used in an Indian restaurant scene filmed in London. While beach scenes were being filmed in the Bahamas, the Beatles were approached by a man in orange robes who handed them a signed copy of his book on yoga. It was Swami Vishnudevanda, the founder of Sivananda Yoga. Intrigued, Harrison began to study Hinduism. He then traveled to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar, who gave him a copy of Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. It was Harrison who invited Shankar to perform at the seminal 1967 Monterey Pop Music Festival in California, where the sitar’s artistic kinship to the electric guitar was dramatically demonstrated. (See the 1969 documentary, Monterey Pop.) The sitar’s cultural impact on the late Sixties paralleled that of the Javanese gamelan on late-nineteenth-century music. Debussy was fascinated by the gamelan (a percussive instrument with gong and bells) when he heard it played at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1889. Through him, the gamelan’s Asian harmonics transformed French and British classical music for the next half-century.